Among people that think about the Web there is disagreement about whether a revolution has occurred. It's rooted in the belief among some that hyperlinks in general and web logs in particular signal something entirely new about the World, that something fundamental has changed -- and changed for the better.

Clay Shirky returns to this theme in his posting, Powerlaws: 2006 Dance Re-mix where he responds to a rather sentimental post from Doc Searls, another thinker about the digital community, who wants to subvert blog hierarchies, the so-called A-list of web log writers who have reached a certain status. Searls:

I have this idea that the
blogosphere is the one place in the world — or perhaps an entirely new
world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net — where there is no
need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.

[P]ower law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many
people express their preferences among many options. We also know
that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme.
This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising
number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the
size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the
median spot.

His take: "Freedom of choice makes stars inevitable." Asking whether it's fair or not is in some sense, beside the point. Physical laws just are. The only revolutionary choice is opting out of the system altogether.

I might have agreed with Searls in the recent past. Now, I've come around to the view that, at least when it comes to the material we (freely) consume, the digital world recreates the off-line reality -- if that reality could be mapped among competing suppliers and consumers of media. The digital media frontier is new and necessary -- media suppliers, which incidentally includes you and me, need to pay attention -- but it's not revolutionary in the sense that old value systems have been swept aside. Fair or not fair, hierarchies develop.

Hyperlinks, do however, expose our choices. More importantly, though, they expose our choices down the Long Tail, the portion of the power curve that trails off at much lower amplitude to near infinity. That space is now available to be explored, aggregated and, with skill, hard work and a break or two, capitalized.